Under Western eyes

Some of the most resonant lines of political commentary penned in the twentieth century can be found in Gil Scott-Heron’s poem ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.’ Suffused with the scepticism of America’s black militants at the mainstream media’s coverage of their struggles, the poem warns that the revolution “will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen,” nor “make you look five pounds thinner” or “fight the germs that give you bad breath” neither will it “be right back after a message.” The revolution will ignore or subvert these traditional stories “because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day.” This, Scott-Heron, presciently noted, could not be packaged neatly within the schedules of commercial television, because “The revolution will be live.”

After the turbulence of the Civil Rights years and the war in Vietnam, however, US networks learned how to dice the chaos of the wider world into digestible televisual morsels and their success shaped the informational habits of a generation. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War was readily explained to Western audiences, as was the first conflict in the Persian Gulf and the carnage in Tiananmen Square. Even the World Trade Center attacks and live coverage of “shock and awe” bombing in Baghdad remained within this paradigm. But the steady progression of distributed communication technologies has broken the hold of the old narratives. Today our idea of authentic reportage is shifting away from central broadcast networks and into the hands of anonymous individuals caught up in the world’s disasters and revolutions. We peer into the vast elsewhere beyond our living rooms via footage shot on handheld phones and cameras, eerily inserted into the perspective of protesters in Egypt, Libya and Bahrain.

Our communications model is shifting in other important ways. Used cleverly, modern phones can coordinate quasi-spontaneous protests which authorities find hard to monitor and deter. Peer-to-peer messaging allows citizens to move beyond a simple response to the news and to create situations which alter the news. There is clear evidence of this as far back as 2001 when Filipinos frustrated by their parliament’s attempts to scuttle the impeachment of President Estrada used text messages to direct more than a million protesters into the heart of the capital, Manila. Similar strategies have been used, with varying degrees of success, in Spain, Belarus, Iran and Thailand.

In one crucial sense, however, the ‘crowd sourcing’ of the recent upheaval in Tunisia and environs marks an important advance over what has gone before. With, perhaps, the honourable exception of Al-Jazeera English, broadcast television has been completely wrongfooted by the speed with which social media have allowed the protesters to adapt to repression and censorship. Without the necessary television crews and journalists in place, many networks have fallen back on wide-angled commentary and speculation. The resulting vacuum has been filled by social media so that the first draft of history is no longer being written by media professionals but scribbled in real time by thousands of people immersed within the events. By and large, all that Western reporters have done is annotate this data, often ineptly, with snippets from the increasingly irrelevant comments of foreign diplomats and statesmen.

The economist and political adviser Jeremy Rifkin has written very perceptively about the ways information technology changes the landscape of politics and culture. Rifkin argues that the new, networked paradigm of social media “is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of human beings and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to flourish on a global scale, for the first time in history.” Rifkin’s primary interest in this development is how it might change the ways we use and share energy, but he is also keenly aware of its other ramifications, especially its potential to erode national, cultural, linguistic and racial barriers. Just a few hours after the earthquake in Haiti, for example, millions of people around the world saw photographs and watched video of the disaster on a wide range of digital devices. This personalized, almost interactive communication produced a noticeable surge in goodwill and charitable giving, and it may be read as an indication that we are on the cusp of becoming what Rifkin calls an “empathic civilization.”

Rifkin argues that the “The real crisis [in our transition to this new stage of communication] lies in the set of assumptions about human nature that governs the behaviour of world leaders –assumptions that were spawned during the Enlightenment more than 200 years ago at the dawn of the modern market economy and the emergence of the nation state era.” Indeed the chasm between nineteenth century diplomacy and twenty-first century communications technology has been all too evident in the spectatorial quality of current responses to the mayhem in the Middle East. While Western governments prevaricate in the language of nation-state sovereignty, the threatened dictators have done their best to exact revenge on would-be democrats in their midst. And yet, despite the West’s unconscionable inaction, “freedom fever” has consumed two longstanding dictators and unsettled half a dozen more.

Yesterday the UN reported that Gaddafi’s crackdown has been “escalating alarmingly,” and it readied itself for emergency sessions. If the record so far is any indication of what lies ahead,  the world’s diplomats will eventually propose some highly nuanced remedy for the situation long after the current killing spree has finished. In the meantime, modern communications allow the rest of us to read and watch, in excruciating ‘real time’ the unfolding horrors and triumphs of the unassisted revolutionaries. Their struggle will be televised, after a fashion, but although we may be on the verge of an age of empathy, our knowledge of their plight will prove to be largely inconsequential.